“You have two paths to take if you’re a man of military age like Igor. You can go and be indoctrinated into cruelty and abuse, or take the only path out, corruption.”

Jeff Parker

author

A young Florida graduate student falls in love with Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Gogol and the greats of Russian literature. But when he follows his literary passion to Russia, he finds a totally different reality, through the eyes of a rambunctious bartender, sometime dock worker, school dropout and draft dodger named Igor.

Jeff Parker’s book, Where Bears Roam the Streets, chronicles a slice of today’s Russia through his 15-year friendship with a struggling young muzhik who spent his formative years negotiating the dangerous curves of an emerging country swerving wildly from dying communism to Wild East capitalism to an increasingly nationalist and authoritarian regime.

Parker, now a lecturer at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, recently talked about life at the raw edge in a Russia that is groping toward the future through a turbulent past.

How did you meet Igor when you arrived in Russia in 1999?

I was young, I’d never been anywhere, and it just blew my mind to be in St. Petersburg in the middle of the white nights (when the summer sun never sets).

Igor was swimming through the Griboyedov Canal as I was passing by. Dostoevsky called the canal a “ditch.” The water was filthy and there was everything the mafia threw into it at that time.

I sat down at a restaurant near the canal and Igor popped out. He overheard me talking to a girl about Russian billiards — I was crazy about pool at that time. He took me to a gangster pool hall and we were there until 6 a.m. He said, “I’ll call you next week and take you to the .banya.”

So began your wild ride through the new Russia?

Against my conservative judgment. Here’s this huge guy, completely drunk, swimming in the middle of the night, and he calls and invites me to a bathhouse. But I wanted new experience at that point in my life so I went.

The foundation of our friendship was a dozen times every summer for 13 years we went to the banya together. It’s an incredible physical experience, but once I got over the shock I began to understand Igor.

The banya is a ritual cleansing, a hangover cure, a place to do business, to have the most intimate talks with friends. We don’t have anything like it: Americans are even nervous about getting naked with each other, let alone beating each other with birch branches.

What did Igor’s story tell you about Russia’s painful transformations?

That was the question I was most interested in. Russia went through the most wrenching political transformation of the 20th century. In some way, Igor’s story was the answer. He was from a broken home. Like many people he thought of himself as a good (Young) Pioneer (the communist equivalent of a Boy Scout).

He was pretty young in 1991 when the Soviet Union ended. But a few years later when he was in the ninth grade, the corrupt school director asked parents to pay a bribe if they wanted their kids to have a place. His stepfather was in jail, his mother was a clerk in a tax office. They couldn’t pay, so he left school.

When you’re young, even those experiences can be exciting. He started at that moment trying to figure out how the system worked and turn it to his advantage.

It didn’t work out so well.

He tried all these different ways to put the new Russia to work for him after it had screwed him from a young age. But he never quite got his footing. He came close in 2008, when I was writing this book about the birth of the new middle class, which was what Igor looked like then. But the global economic crisis kicked in, then the Russian Spring (protests). Things changed again.

Like Russia, Igor was struggling to find his balance.

Yes, instead of having a foundation under his feet, he had only shifting earth. Everything was constantly changing. Life savings disappeared, there were the Chechen war horrors, then (President Vladimir) Putin’s ascendance and transformation. It was a slow build to stability.

One constant thing was alcohol.

There’s a terrible statistic in Russia: half of all the men who died since 1991 had deaths that were alcohol related. They got drunk and stepped in front of a car, or drank their livers out. There’s a sense that nothing will change there.

In Russia I saw more dead bodies that I’ve ever seen in my life. Once, Igor went to his favourite fishing hole, which took a long time to get to. They came across a “floater.” He called to another guy, who said, “Oh yeah, but it took 18 hours to get here and if I report it I’ll lose a whole day of fishing.” So they spent the day fishing and reported it on the way home.

Russia appears to be a functioning country, but is there any rule of law?

Corruption is central to the way things work. One of the first things Putin did when he came to power was meet with the oligarchs, and tell them “we won’t look at what you’ve done, but stay out of politics.” That goes a long way to showing you how things work. Corruption touches everyone’s life from the micro to the macro level.

The army is a prime example: it’s run by professional soldiers who in many cases torture the conscripts. You have two paths to take if you’re a man of military age like Igor. You can go and be indoctrinated into cruelty and abuse, or take the only path out, corruption. For many young men, it’s their first “macro bribe.”

You’ve shown how people become demoralized. Has that fuelled the surge of nationalism and support for Putin since the annexation of Crimea?

A guy like Igor just feels suppressed and beaten down. That’s the collective impression of Russia. “We’ve been beaten down by the West. We’ve been made small. Now here’s our chance to look strong and command respect.” Igor had been saving dollars and euros for years, but he decided to convert to rubles. It was his pride.

This feeling is coalescing around nationalist ideology, like the speech that Putin recently made using the term “New Russia” (for parts of Ukraine). It doesn’t look very optimistic.

The nationalist trend seems to have accelerated the crackdown on peaceful protest, and people have been accused of staging “mass riots” and jailed. Has the protest movement been crushed?

People’s lives are centred on the Internet, but I’m not sure that they use it for digging into the truth beneath the state media censorship, except for those in protest and intellectual circles in Moscow and Petersburg.

Is Igor’s story, like Russia’s, still being written?

Igor is representative of guys in courtyards all over Russia — out of work, alcoholic and ex-military guys. He’s extraordinarily bright and one of my best friends. But he doesn’t think Russia will ever change. I wanted to find a way to put his story down. If you can understand where he’s coming from, maybe the support for the nationalist fervour is somehow comprehensible. He’s the apolitical person just trying to live his life on essentially shifting ground.